Emma Hart Willard: Innovating Girls' Education

Emma Willard School, circa 1940 (The Tichnor Brothers
Collection, Boston Public Library)

The story of entrepreneur Emma Willard (1787-1870) was deleted from Innovation on Tap in the final days of editing as we struggled to keep the book to a manageable length.  But Willard's story remains inspirational and, knowing that 130 million girls globally continue to be denied educational opportunities, highly relevant.

As I reviewed this post, I was struck again by how savvy Willard was in the way she positioned and advanced her signature educational innovation.  She told the Lords of Albany one thing--but clearly had another in mind.

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In a world where fathers determined the future of each family member, women in the early American republic had little opportunity to engage in entrepreneurial activities.  “God made woman to be a help for man,” the Reverend Horace Bushnell wrote, “not to be a wrestler with him.”^[1] 

Mrs. A. J. Graves cautioned that for a woman to leave the home sphere meant that she was deserting the station which God and nature had assigned her.  “Home,” Graves reminded her sisters, “is the cradle of the human race.”^[2]

Emma Willard (Schlesinger Library on
the History of Women in America, Harvard)

If females were responsible for the home, and home was the wellspring of civilization, then—a logical person might conclude—females ought to have greater access to the educational opportunities afforded men.  And few female educators took advantage of this crack in the ordained hierarchy more successfully than Emma Hart Willard, born the sixteenth child of a Connecticut farmer. 

Willard escaped the drudgery of farm life to accept a teaching job at a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont.  Unhappy with the curriculum and convinced that women should be exposed to the same academic disciplines as men, she petitioned the New York legislature to grant state aid to open a girls’ schools. 

Her 1819 essay, “A Plan for Improving Female Education,” expressed her disappointment at the inferior educational opportunities available to females while laying out the novel idea of a school for women’s higher education.  

Willard knew to tread gently, emphasizing that the school she sought to create would be different from those available to men.  She did not wish to “insinuate that we are not, in particular situations, to yield obedience to the other sex” nor did she seek to make females anything but agreeable to men.  She could undoubtedly anticipate these objections in the New York Assembly as politicians read her tract.  “You are our natural guardians,” she pleaded, and “we have the charge of the whole mass of individuals, who are to compose the succeeding generations.” 

But, she wrote, the education of females has been too long directed “to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.”  This curriculum did not prepare them for the “serious duties of mature years.”  Why, she asked, "have you neglected our education?”^[3]

Emma Willard Statue, Emma Willard
Seminary (Curt Teich postcards,
Detroit Publishing Company)

Willard proposed to found a female seminary that included lodging and classrooms, a library, musical instruments, maps and globes, and a small collection of philosophical apparatus. Instruction would be religious and moral, literary, domestic (training in “the best methods of housewifery”), and ornamental (drawing, painting, elegant penmanship, music, and grace of motion). 

The New York legislature remained unmoved, but New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was not.  With the Governor’s blessing, Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, the first school in America for women’s higher education.  There (in a foreshadowing of what we would one day call "STEM,") she managed to slip in a few subjects to complement “housewifery”--including mathematics, history, science, and geography. 

Today, the Troy Female Seminary continues its successful operation as the Emma Willard School.  And the World Bank reminds us that giving girls access to schooling is the most powerful way to eradicate poverty, raise a nation's GDP, and improve outcomes for children around the world.

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[1] Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 258.

[2] “A. J. Graves Gives a Scriptural Justification for Women’s Domesticity, 1843,” Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787-1848, Wilentz and Earle, ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 155.

[3] Emma Willard, A Plan For Improving Female Education, Middlebury, VT: Middlebury College [rpt: 1819, 2^nd edition], 1918.